>>49615450
Well, even for someone who would a more casual tourist, it's a really beatiful area. The lake was much bigger than I expected. There's a lot of mountains and forests. There's also good vantage points which let you see the surroundings much better.
There were a handful of foreign tourists around, but off-season it's not crowded at all, and you don't see the kind of bad effects of tourism you see in more popular places. There's no travel groups making a ruckus and acting like ass. This means that the locals also aren't exhausted with foreigners, something I kinda felt in couple other places at times.
If you go there in off-season (not in winter, not during the fireworks or matsuri) and engage with the locals in some way you're gonna have people who are curious as to why you've come there. This is probably even more true if you are interested in the local history and culture like I am. I had some of the best talks with locals I've had in Japan there, though the best was in Minakamiyama where a dude explained Japanese creation myths with mix of Japanese, English and gesturing.
But for me the absolute best part was going there and just feeling it. The moment I saw Maemiya, heard the chorus of insects, birds and frogs, so localized to the shrine it was as if it was the building itself making the noise, I really felt it. All shrines have this quality that is greater than the sum of it's parts, but it's just impossible to capture the sheer presence in there with words or pictures. In that moment I knew I hadn't come there after some pointless delusion or some trickery by something masquerading as the Suwa kami.
Later that night, when I was falling asleep, I saw myself from a bird's eye view, walking around Maemiya. I saw white snakes and golden mist and ancient tree roots and the lake surface stretching out. I saw myself as a baby in Kanako-sama's lap. I recognized it and it recognized me and it acknowledged me as the most distant, strangest blossom in Suwa's tree of life. After that, for the rest of the time spent in Suwa, I faintly felt it everywhere, in all the myriad little shrines and dosojin and jizo statues all over Suwa.
There's something unfathomably vast, alive and real there and if you open yourself to it you can become part of it. If you give it the respect it deserves it can lend you a fragment of it's power and it can teach you. It's lesson is perhaps the only one you ever need to really learn and it is: you have to shed your skin or you will die. But it's not some crushing obligation, it's a joy, a priviledge, you can and will shed your skin over and over again untill you become what you were meant to be.
You can do things you thought previously impossible. You can go from someone afraid of crowds and plane crashes and allergies and sudden cardiatric arrests, afraid of living, afraid of dying, into someone who can climb a mountain, of faith, and a literal one, and a year on from now, maybe even bigger mountains. And if circumstances don't allow it, it doesn't matter, because you can be born again, change course, adapt. And when the final transformation comes, be it tomorrow or decades from now, it will not be the end, just a reaping and tally of this life's harvest in preparation for the next one.
The fact this all happened because I started playing silly danmaku games with the funny looking girls and lore connected to distant mythologies is unbelievable, but reality truly is stranger than fiction. You just have to open yourself to life and let it change you, no matter how crazy or unlikely it is.
